Tesco blinks

Rather overlooked in the news of Tesco's contractions on many fronts yesterday was the offloading of Blinkbox, its electronic music/books/movies service.

Tesco had bought into Blinkbox during the height of its imperial expansion, on a vague theory that because it flogged CDs and DVDs it should be selling digital equivalents. It started to make a bit more sense when Tesco launched the Hudl tablet, but in the end it's decided that it's a distraction from selling bread and cheese.

New owner is TalkTalk, although it's not yet clear how keen they were on the content business, and how much they just wanted to get their hands on the Tesco phone and broadband customers. (Obviously, they were part of the deal. You can't buy anything related to telecommunications without it coming as part of a bundle.)